The Rain Wild Chronicles: The Complete 4-Book Collection. Robin Hobb
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when he had been telling her tales of river navigation, and how quickly a channel he had used one month could silt in by the next she, burning to distinguish herself, had nodded wisely and recounted a story from an old scroll that had spoken about how often the passage to the Kelsingra docks had to be dredged. He had replied that he’d never heard of such a city, and she had dismissed it with a shrug, saying that perhaps the river had swallowed it long ago.
She looked at Malta. The Elderling looked poised for flight; she leaned slightly toward Alise, her eyes burning with hope. The light globes that had drifted to surround her had spread again, but she still seemed at the centre of all light in the room. How could Alise tell her that Kelsingra was little more than a name in a scroll to her? She glanced helplessly about and her eyes, by fate or chance, snagged on a tapestry to the left of Malta. A strange thrill shot through her. She slowly lifted her hand and pointed at it. ‘There is Kelsingra.’ She walked toward it, her heart beating faster with every step. ‘Give me more light here, please,’ she said, almost forgetting where she was and to whom she spoke in the excitement of her find.
In response to her request, Malta sent the light globes flocking after her. They followed her and when she halted, they did. When they gathered around the tapestry, it was almost like looking out a window into a woven world. It was all there. The perspective had been skewed deliberately by the weaver so that more landmarks could be included. ‘There.’ She lifted her hand and pointed as she spoke. ‘That would be the famous map tower of Kelsingra. From what I have read, I believe that map towers were created in several of their larger cities. In each tower there would be a large relief map of the surrounding area, and the encircling windows of the tower looked out on the depicted area. Sometimes there were symbols for more distant locations. The scrolls imply that somehow the map towers helped people to travel swiftly, but they do not say how. The map tower at Kelsingra is referred to in several scrolls, perhaps indicating that it was of more importance than some of the others.’
Distantly she heard her own voice. She had taken on a pedagogic tenor, the tone she had sometimes dreamed that she would employ someday when her scholarship was recognized and people would wish her to share her knowledge. Never had she dreamed she would lecture in a place like Cassarick or that her audience would include an Elderling. Her hand moved and she pointed again. ‘You can see that the map tower is in the spire of a very impressive building. The decorative frieze on the front shows an Elderling woman ploughing behind an ox. The adjacent wall, as you can see, depicts a queen dragon. I speculate that the conjunction of the two is no accident, but shows that the two of them were as important to the city as the two walls that support this main city structure. We can only wonder what was on the other two faces of the building.
‘Note the depth and width of the stairs that approach the grand entry doors. Human, or human-sized Elderlings would have no need of such steps, nor of such immense doors. It’s clear to me that this structure, identified in one scroll as the Citadel of Records, welcomed both Elderlings and dragons inside its walls.’
‘But where is it? Where is Kelsingra?’ Malta’s low anxious voice cut through Alise’s lecture.
Slowly the Bingtown woman turned to look at the Elderling. ‘I cannot tell you that with any precision. As far as I know, no map of the areas that we now call the Rain Wilds has ever been recovered. But from the written descriptions we have, I can say with certainty that it was substantially upriver of both Trehaug and Cassarick. We do have descriptions of the lush meadowlands that surrounded the city and provided good grazing for both domesticated cattle and wild game. The dragons feasted freely on both, and it was considered their right to do so. But such open rolling meadows do not fit with the jungled Rain Wilds that we know. Nor does the description of the river. According to the scrolls, the river that ran past Kelsingra was deep and during flood-times, it was swift running and treacherous. The illustrations in the scrolls and here on this tapestry clearly show keeled sailing vessels both approaching the city and tying up at its docks. There are trade vessels of considerable size already moored there. Again, these images do not fit with the Rain Wild River as we know it now. So, we can speculate that either the river has changed, a fact that is obviously true given the buried ruins that have been unearthed here, or we can wonder if there existed another, different river, a tributary or one that is perhaps merged now with our Rain Wild River, that originally fronted Kelsingra.’
She ran out of breath and words at the same time. She turned away from the tapestry and back to her audience. Malta’s face was a mixture of triumph and misery. The brushy haired Rain Wilds woman at the table was nodding her head vigorously. ‘Excellent!’ she exclaimed before anyone else could speak. ‘We are indebted to you, madam. The black dragon has spoken of this Kelsingra as the best possible destination for the dragons. They have dropped hints to us that it was a major Elderling city. But up to now, we lacked confirmation of its existence. You offer us not only the physical evidence of the tapestry but your scholarly opinion that such a place did, and possibly still does exist. We could not ask for better news, any of us!’
‘I could,’ Malta asserted flatly. ‘I could ask for a map that would clearly show us where the city once existed in relation to the two Elderling cities that we have already located.’ She flicked her fingers as if in annoyance and the light globes scattered like startled cats. She moved to one of the tiers of benches and slowly sank down onto it. She suddenly appeared not only merely human, but very tired. ‘We have failed them so badly. We gave a promise to Tintaglia and we began by doing the best we could for them. Slowly we let our standards fall, and the last two years have just been a nightmare. So many of them have died.’
‘Without our help, all of them would have died. Without our help, most of them would never have cocooned, let alone hatched.’ Trader Polsk presented the fact simply.
‘Without us cutting them up into planks to build ships, more of them might have survived to hatch during that quake,’ Malta retorted.
‘If there had not been liveships, would you have been there at all?’ Alise dared to interject the question. Malta appeared to be mired in despair, but Alise felt a growing excitement. The most wonderful idea she had ever imagined was slowly unfolding in her mind. She hardly dared state it. She teetered on dread that they might refuse her and terror that they might accept her offer. She tried to keep her voice steady as she asked, ‘How soon must the dragons be moved?’
‘The sooner the better,’ Trader Polsk replied. She ran both her hands through her brush of grey hair, standing it up like a dragon’s crest. ‘Delay can only make it worse for all of us, including the dragons. If it were possible for them to leave tomorrow, that is what I would choose.’
‘Yet I have come all the way from Bingtown just for the purpose of studying these dragons and possibly conversing with them,’ Alise objected.
‘You will find them little inclined to conversation,’ Malta said drearily. ‘Even if you had come months ago, it would have been so. They have ancestral memories of the dragons they should have been. Much as I hate to admit it, Trader Polsk is right. They are and have been miserable where they are. I have done my best to visit them often, and I know the hardships that have been created for those who tried to keep faithfully the terms of our bargain with Tintaglia. I am not blind to those things. I just wish it could have a better ending. I wish that I could go with them and see them safely settled in some better place. But I cannot.’
She sounded so defeated that Alise wondered if the Elderling woman were ill. But then she set her hands to her belly in the unmistakable gesture of a woman who is with child, and sets that child’s well-being above all in her life. It was like the last piece of a puzzle falling into place. The circumstances were exactly right for her; if it was not fate, it was close enough.
‘You cannot go, but I can.’ She spoke the words clearly, offering herself and seizing a chance for herself in the same breath. ‘I am willing to travel with them, using my knowledge of their kind to aid them in any way I can. I am eager to travel with them, to learn of them all I can, to observe their kind and, if I dare to admit it, in the wild hope that I could be with them if and when Kelsingra is rediscovered. Let me be the one to go.’
Silence greeted her words, but it was of a mixed sort. Malta looked at her as if she were a vision